John Wyndham - Chocky

JOHN WYNDHAM

With an introduction by Brian Aldiss

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN CLASSICS

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First published by Michael Joseph 1968

Published in Penguin Books 1970

Published in Penguin Classics 2010

Copyright John Wyndham, 1968

Introduction copyright Brian Aldiss, 2010

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author and the introducer has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-196472-0

PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

CHOCKY

John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Benyon Harris was born in 1903, the son of a barrister. He tried a number of careers, including farming, law, commercial art and advertising, and started writing short stories, intended for sale, in 1925. From 1930 to 1939 he wrote stories of various kinds under different names, almost exclusively for American publications, while also writing detective novels. During the war he was in the Civil Service and then the Army. In 1946 he went back to writing stories for publication in the USA and decided to try a modified form of science fiction, a form he called logical fantasy. As John Wyndham he wrote The Day of the Triffi ds and The Kraken Wakes (both widely translated), The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos (filmed as Village of the Damned), The Seeds of Time, Trouble With Lichen, The Outward Urge (with Lucas Parkes), Consider Her Ways and Others, Web and Chocky, all of which has been published by Penguin. In 2010 Penguin published his recently-discovered Plan for Chaos.

Poet, playwright, critic, fiction and science-fiction writer Brian Aldiss was born in 1925 in Dereham, Norfolk, and is the author of more than seventy-five books. He lives in Oxford and was awarded an OBE in 2005 for Services to Literature

Introduction

Heres a precious family heirloom, retrieved from the vaults John Wyndhams Chocky, no less. It is the story of a middle-class English family whose son, Matthew, has a problem, a hearing problem, of sorts. The story bumbles gently on until, in Chapter Eleven, the final chapter, all is revealed.

And in Chapter Eleven we receive a pretty sharp lecture on our faults and inadequacies, much of which rings true today. Yet the story was written in the early nineteen-sixties; it carries an antique charm. We are introduced first of all to the young teenager who seems to have an imaginary friend, by name Chocky. Nothing too unusual there; my older son had a mysterious friend called Gaux. Only in that final chapter do we find that Wyndham has been writing with a guillotine up his sleeve.

Mary and her unnamed husband, who tells the tale, marry after spending an uncomfortable night in a hotel near Lake Como. Uncomfortable. But no sex not in the swinging sixties when Wyndham was writing? Possibly the scene is set in the nineteen-thirties. There is reference to the wireless but not to TV, and the central character drinks an occasional whisky (without telling us how much he enjoys it) or the odd sherry

Their lives tick comfortably on, with Mary, the wife, spending most of her time knitting. On one occasion, she stares into the loops of her knitting with a slight squint. She reproves someone who calls something lousy. The husband addresses his lad as old man; the lad, unlike many of todays teenagers, tolerates this without protest.

So all told this is pretty comfortable stuff, except for the narrators veiled dislike of women. At one point he admits I dont understand women. Nobody does. Least of all themselves. I dont know, and nor do they, for instance, how far this compulsion that most of them have to produce a baby as soon as possible after marriage and so on. I have a suspicion myself that husbands might have something to do with this situation.

But Matthew, the haunted son, is the centre of our interest. We catch him on the very first page, arguing with his invisible someone about the length of a day. Matthew says that a day lasts for twenty-four hours; why would thirty-two hours be more sensible? This invisible someone, Chocky, continues to question Matthew about many of the perceived absurdities of our terrestrial arrangements. For instance, it is such a waste of energy that our cars have wheels We are still locked into the love of our discovery of the wheel.

Such comments are the salt of the book. Most of your power is being used to build machines to consume power faster and faster, while your sources of power remain finite. Chockys comments have a point that remains sharp fifty or more years later.

It is fortunate that no one in Wyndhams cosy family ever read any science fiction, or they would have guessed the secret of Matthews unseen companion by page ten, and then we would have had no book. Nor would we have perceived the lonely pinpoint of reason dwelling in the wastes of space.

There is some mystery about the original date of publication of Chocky. Penguin have 1968 as first publication by the firm of Michael Joseph. Infallible John Clute, in his Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction, gives 1963. He must be right. My belief is that it appeared first in Good Housekeeping. I thought that was carrying cosyness too far Yet even today one can feel the itch of attraction in having a member of an unguessably remote planet in conversation with Earthlings.

In the days when Wyndham himself was an Earthling, I knew him slightly, sometimes drinking coffee with him in company with four other people. He was always modest and courteous. He liked to tell the tale of how he would go to his local pub and drink a sherry on a Sunday. On one occasion, two gardeners were there, chatting about their allotments. One gardner said to the other, I got a great big weed growing behind my shed. I reckon it be a triffid! John knew he had given a new word to the English language! Nevertheless, he retained his abstemious habits. When invited to the Film Festival in Rio de Janeiro, he turned it down on the grounds that he might have the company of heavy drinkers like Kingsley Amis and Brian Aldiss

We would have enjoyed his company, even sober. His early stories were published in that pleasant family magazine, Passing Show, in the nineteen-thirties. The Day of the Triffi ds first appeared in 1951, eventually finding itself on the Penguin list, together with John Christophers